Thleep.Earth Broadcasts
w/ Thleep.Earth
THLEEP is an ongoing sound and light project exploring the therapeutic potential of neuro-acoustics and vision-physiology. In 2023 the project developed Thleep Broadcasts as a series of audio-only works intended for listening via radio. These broadcasts blend natural and everyday-ambient sounds, offering experimental audio experiences that explore how sound can passively shape mental and emotional states.
Each work carefully subverts stereotypes of meditative sounds by using and manipulating more everyday and mechanical environmental sounds to induce states of rest and relaxation. These works are here to offer an intimate, restorative, and experiential experience to aid in reducing anxiety and to promote healthier sleep cycles.
The works are developed by a collective of artists across Europe and Asia. To find out more, please visit thleep.earth
Best experienced in a relaxed position with headphones.
Podcast
Broadcast 17 - Almetic Frequency 936Hz – Sensory Tuning | The Venus Tone
Adding ‘more’ does not mean experiencing something fuller.
Most people imagine that perception becomes richer through accumulation. More information. More stimulation. More complexity. Yet often the opposite is true. Senses become clearer when they are allowed to settle into harmony.
936Hz restores harmony. It comes from Seventy-Two, a number of ritual completeness.
Seventy-Two is a number that appears wherever proportion and relationship become important. It is found in geometry, in cycles, in systems that seek balance between movement and stability. It is a number that does not stand alone. Its significance comes from how it relates. It is a number of harmony through relationship.
In Hermetic thought, wisdom is not found by separating oneself from the world, but by recognising the connections that already exist within it. The eye perceives through relationship. The ear perceives through relationship. Meaning itself emerges through relationship.
When Seventy-Two is carried into vibration and multiplied by Thirteen - the indivisible prime, the bridge between structure and transformation - it becomes 936. A harmonising tone. A tone that encourages attunement.
This tone belongs to Venus. Venus is often reduced to beauty. But beauty is only its most visible expression.
Venus governs harmony, proportion, attraction, and resonance. It is the principle that allows separate things to recognise themselves as belonging to a greater whole. Where Mars creates movement, Venus creates relationship. It teaches us alignment.
This tone's metal is Copper. Copper is a conductor.
It carries energy with ease. It allows movement between points without resistance. Throughout history it has connected systems, transferred signals, and linked distant things together. It does not create energy. It allows energy to travel. Copper teaches connection.
936Hz carries this quality.
When you sit with it, you allow smaller details to become more apparent. Sounds seem more distinct. Spaces feel more defined. Sensations that normally pass unnoticed begin to reveal themselves. The world does not become louder. It becomes clearer. This is the tone for Sensory Tuning.
We are surrounded by constant stimulation, and over time, the senses learn to defend themselves through filtering and exclusion. Much is seen but not noticed. Much is heard but not received. Venus restores receptivity through harmony.
936Hz provides a stable reference against which perception can reorganise itself. The nervous system listens for coherence. When coherence is found, attention begins to refine itself naturally.
This is not magic. It is what happens when perception is given the opportunity to listen properly.
We have forgotten the usefulness of harmony.
We seek intensity when often what we need is attunement.
Copper carries the signal because it remains open to transmission.
Remain with this tone long enough, and your senses will begin to organise themselves around its gentle coherence. Allow the overlooked to become visible. The distant to become present. The ordinary to become rich with detail.
This is not a hidden teaching. It is a quiet one.
936Hz is the fifth of the Almetic Frequencies.
Listen to 936Hz to tune the senses by refining perception, restoring harmony, and deepening awareness of the relationships that already surround you.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 16 - Almetic Frequency 637Hz - Reflective Anchoring | The Moon Tone
You do not need to solve every feeling the moment it arrives.
Many people move too quickly through themselves. They experience, react, distract, continue. In this way, nothing is fully absorbed. The mind becomes crowded with unfinished impressions.
This tone restores reflection, and it comes from Forty-Nine. It is Seven multiplied by itself. Seven classical planets. Seven visible movements across the ancient sky. Seven principles through which the old world understood order and influence. When Seven is squared, it becomes Forty-Nine and is structure made reflective.
In Hermetic thought, there comes a stage where movement must pause long enough for understanding to settle. Without reflection, experience passes through a person without becoming wisdom. Reflection gives shape to memory. It allows meaning to form slowly.
When Forty-Nine is carried into vibration by Thirteen - the indivisible prime, the threshold beyond ordinary completion - it becomes 637. A receptive tone. A tone that listens as much as it speaks.
This tone belongs to the Moon. The Moon does not generate light. It reflects it. This is its teaching.
The Moon governs tides, rhythms, emotional cycles, subtle changes that reveal themselves only through patience. It does not command through force. It influences through repetition, through return, through quiet presence. The Moon teaches attunement.
This tone’s metal is Silver. Silver is fluid. It receives shape easily and responds to even subtle disturbance. It reflects clearly without holding what passes across its surface. In the old traditions, Silver was valued not for dominance, but for sensitivity. Silver notices.
637Hz carries this quality.
When you sit with it, you may notice the appearance of distance between yourself and your thoughts. Emotions that felt immediate begin to soften at the edges. Memories rise without force. The body settles into observation rather than reaction. Nothing is removed. Only clarified.
This is the tone for Reflective Anchoring.
In the modern world, people rarely remain still long enough to absorb their own experience. Everything is pushed forward before it has fully settled. This creates emotional residue — unprocessed movement carried silently through the nervous system.
The Moon restores the reflective pause.
637Hz gives the mind and body a stable surface upon which experience can settle and become visible. The nervous system listens for rhythm. When rhythm is found, internal noise begins to separate into discernible patterns.
This is what happens when stillness is allowed to complete its work. We have forgotten the usefulness of reflection. We treat pause as absence, when often it is integration. Silver reflects the world clearly because it does not cling to what it sees.
Remain with it long enough, and the internal world will begin organising itself around its calm receptivity. The reactive becomes observant. The burdened becomes spacious. The fragmented becomes understood.
An old rhythm that we have forgotten.
637Hz is the fourth of the Almetic Frequencies.
Listen to 637Hz to anchor reflection by allowing thoughts, emotions, and experiences to settle into coherence through stillness and gentle awareness.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 15 - Almetic Frequency 429Hz – Flow Adjustment | The Mars Tone
There is never a need to force movement. Many people mistake pressure for progress. Energies get trapped when people push when they should redirect, and when people resist when they should turn. This is when movement becomes struggle.
The tone is grounded in the number Thirty-Three. Thirty-Three appears wherever effort meets refinement. It is spoken of as a master number because it suggests that raw force has already passed through discipline and become usable. In this way, it is energy that has learned direction.
In Hermetic thought, mastery is not domination. It is alignment. It is the moment when internal order begins to move in step with a greater law. What was once scattered becomes coherent. What was once reactive becomes deliberate.
When Thirty-Three is carried into vibration by Thirteen — our indivisible prime, the step into active becoming — it becomes 429. A moving tone. A tone that does not push, yet encourages movement.
This tone belongs to Mars. Mars is often misunderstood. People think Mars is aggression. It is not. Aggression is distorted Mars. True Mars is courage, momentum, readiness, clean action. It is the force that allows hesitation to become movement and intention to become deed. Mars cuts stagnation.
This tone’s metal is Iron, and Iron is honest. It bears weight, holds edges, carries force. It is found in tools, in structures, in the blood itself. Iron does not pretend. It responds directly to use. The strength of Iron grows through contact and teaches us movement through resistance.
This is the quality of 429Hz.
When you sit with it, you may notice practical things: heaviness begins to shift throughout the body. The body may wish to straighten, breathe more fully and deeply, or move without being told. This is the re-activation of stagnant flow.
This is the tone for Flow Adjustment.
In our modern world, many people are not lacking energy. They are carrying blocked energy. Too much starting and stopping. Too much interruption leading to fractured hesitation. Too much force applied in the wrong direction. This creates friction inside the mind and body. Mars restores clean momentum.
429Hz gives the system a steady reference for movement without chaos. The nervous system recognises purposeful rhythm. When it finds it, unnecessary resistance begins to fall away, and with it force meets the right direction, leading to relief.
We have forgotten the usefulness of disciplined motion. We swing between exhaustion and overexertion, stillness and panic. But the river does not move by straining. It moves by following its course.
And Iron forms the bridge because it accepts load and carries it forward.
Remain with it long enough, and your internal energy will reorganise around its own momentum. The stagnant becomes responsive. The scattered becomes directed. The restless becomes capable. Our flow is restored to its natural path.
This is not a new-age teaching. It is an old one.
429Hz is the third of the Almetic Frequencies. Listen to 429Hz to adjust flow by releasing friction, restoring movement, and allowing energy to travel where it is needed.
Tracklist:
- all audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 14 - Almetic Frequency 312Hz – Attention Stabilisation | The Jupiter Tone
You do not need intensity to find clarity. Most people try to focus by tightening. They strain the mind as if attention were a muscle. But attention does not respond to pressure. Attention responds to space.
312Hz offers that space.
It comes from Twenty-Four. Twenty-Four is not significant because someone labelled it sacred. It is significant because it divides the world into comprehensible portions — hours, phases, directions doubled. It is the number of the full turning of the day and the quiet order beneath its cycles.
Twenty-Four is the measure by which time breathes. When Twenty-Four is carried into vibration and multiplied by Thirteen — the prime that pushes the physical cycle one step into the unseen — it becomes 312. A widened tone. A tone with room inside it.
This tone belongs to Jupiter. Jupiter expands, but not in the way people expect. It does not explode outward. It broadens steadily. It creates generous space around what matters so that it can be held without strain. Jupiter brings coherence, not chaos. It enlarges the container so attention has somewhere to rest.
This tone’s metal is Tin. Tin is not precious, but it is adaptable. It shapes easily and holds form without resistance. It is a metal that accommodates. It allows movement without breaking structure — the quality required whenever the mind must settle without becoming rigid. Tin invites spaciousness.
When you sit with it, something subtle happens: your field of attention softens. The mind stops flinching from distraction. The thoughts that used to tug at you still appear, but the tone gives them room, and in that room they lose their urgency. Nothing sharpens; instead, everything aligns.
This is the tone for Attention Stabilisation.
We live in an age of overstimulation, where people think their minds are weak because they drift. But often the drifting comes from too many demands pressing inward at once. The attention is crowded, not broken.
Jupiter clears a space in which attention can breathe again. 312Hz gives the nervous system a sense of internal expansion — a widening. The mind recognises that it does not need to cling. It can rest within itself.
This is not magic. It is the natural rhythm of a mind no longer cornered. We have forgotten the usefulness of space. We treat focus as a narrowing, when it is often an opening.
Remain with it long enough, and your attention will organise around its spacious coherence. The scattered becomes steady. The agitated becomes observant. The mind remembers how to rest without collapsing.
This is not a hidden teaching. It is an obvious one we simply rarely hear.
312Hz is the second of the Almetic Frequencies. Listen to 312Hz to stabilise attention by allowing the mind to open, soften, and gather itself again.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 13 - Almetic Frequency 156Hz - Structural Recalibration | The Saturn Tone
You do not need to search for complicated things. The important frequencies are rarely the bright ones. 156Hz is simple. That is why it is overlooked.
It comes from Twelve. Twelve is not mystical because someone declared it so. It is mystical because it repeats. Twelve months. Twelve hours in the turning of light. Twelve divisions through which the Sun appears to travel. Twelve signs across zodiacs. When a number repeats across nature and culture, it is not superstition. It repeats because it is undeniable structure. Twelve, in hermetic numerology, is the shape of completion, divinity.
When Twelve is carried into vibration and sealed by Thirteen — the indivisible prime, one step beyond our physical realm structure of Twelve towards the spiritual — it becomes 156. A stable tone. A tone that does not ask for attention, yet holds it.
This tone belongs to Saturn. Saturn is not dramatic. Saturn is patient. It governs bone, boundary, time. It teaches slowly. It reduces what is excessive. It strengthens what remains.
This tone’s metal is Lead. Lead is heavy, yes — but heaviness is not a flaw. Heaviness allows a thing to stay where it is placed. Lead absorbs disturbance. It does not flash or shine. It endures.
156Hz carries this quality.
When you sit with it, you may notice something very ordinary: your breathing changes. Your thoughts slow. The edges of your attention gather inward. Nothing spectacular happens. There is no vision. No revelation. Only settling.
This is the tone for Structural Recalibration.
In the modern world, people believe they are tired because they lack energy. Often they are tired because they lack structure. Their attention has no boundary. Their rhythm has no frame.
Saturn restores the frame. 156Hz, a low, steady tone, gives the body something reliable to measure against. The nervous system listens for stability. When it finds it, it relaxes into it.
This is not magic. It is gravity.
We have forgotten the usefulness of weight. We chase brightness and speed, but Lead holds the foundation of the temple, even if no one sees it.
156Hz is such a foundation.
Remain with it long enough, and the body will reorganise around its steadiness. The scattered becomes gathered. The restless becomes contained. The internal walls stand upright again.
This is not a secret teaching. It is a simple one.
156Hz is the first of the Almetic Frequencies. Listen to 156Hz to structurally recalibrate by being held and grounded through this tone.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 12 - Impossible Silence
Is silence as close to an impossibility as we can get?
Our ears are incredibly finely tuned instruments, and in partnership with our brain we are capable of tuning out many things that make noise. When we focus on a task, the audio world around us dissolves. It quietens. We are no longer listening to the conversations around us, or the sound of phones going off, doors opening and closing, fans whirring, traffic whizzing by outside. Those things all still make noise, but when we don’t attend to them, they don’t matter as much. But in this system our ears, as marvellous as they are, they’re never truly off.
Even in environments such as anechoic chambers, or sensory deprivation tanks, where all other sounds are absent, we still hear ‘ourselves’; our heart beats, our breaths, an odd pulsing in the ears, and the ever so slight movements of things around us. Our ears are indeed finely tuned, so much so that in the absence of sounds, the smaller sounds around us get heightened. We are biologically hard-wired to always be looking for clues to help us assess, so that we may safely navigate, our immediate environment. Are ears are always on, and that means silence is never truly silence.
Without a true ‘off-switch’, the best we could likely hope for is ‘relative’ silence; after a day of commuting through the city, we return to a place where we control the volume of the environment, and within that space we can create a silence of our own design.
The spaces we consider our own have their own low-level sounds that, interestingly and unconsciously to us, create a sense of comfort - If we’re alone in our own home the sounds; like the creak of floorboards or the water running through pipes, are so familiar that we can pick out sounds that aren’t supposed to be there. But have you ever stayed at someone else’s house by yourself? The sounds of an unfamiliar house can be alarming - because every sound is unfamiliar. It is only another quiet, silent house, but it isn’t comforting to us in the same way that our own might be.
It’s the small things that get us located in our own comfort; the level of electrical hums from our fridge and other electrical appliances in the background of our homes, these are truly unique to us and our home. Our ‘silent’ rooms are actually alive with low level noise that we have grown accustomed to. So much so, that should the power go out, and the low-level humming stop, it can be disarming.
Do we actually want silence? In our world, today, we seek out MORE sonic complexity, buying home sound systems that are surround sound, enjoying cinema systems that are more dynamic, going to concerts and clubs that are bassier and louder… we keep pursuing maximal sonic experiences, in our waking time we want higher definition, brighter, louder, deeper, immersive!
And when we seek relaxation, rather than deprive ourselves of sensory stimuli, we visit spas that play relaxing music? If we need to be stimulated in order to relax, what role does silence have?
For many, the absence of sound is more disorienting. The world has never been silent. We have never lived in a vaccum, never lived in a world where something wasn’t doing something, where wind wasn’t moving though trees, where insects weren’t crawling across surfaces, where rain wasn’t hitting the ground, where the waves weren’t ebbing and flowing... And so perhaps that is why true silence is an impossibility to us. It is, when you think about it, unnatural to us. It is a state of existence that would have to be manufactured.
And maybe it is why we try to avoid silence. Whilst it might be in vogue to think that removing distractions and returning to a state of silence may be therapeutic, people have anxious aversions to being deprived of stimulus. Being left alone in silence, with only our thoughts can be a terrifying proposition for many.
Maybe we have reached the point of no return, where a state of even relative silence is now too alien to us. Perhaps ‘silence’ is now more about an internal experience, more of a state of ‘being’ rather than something we attribute to an external environment? A stillness of the mind, no matter what is going on around us.
But to me, there is no doubt that a return to an environment of stillness, brings with it a primal sense of calm, as if all the cells in our body are somehow remembering a memory from a long time ago. Whilst true silence might remain an impossibility, we still yearn for quiet, for space to reflect, to recharge. But given all the noise of our contemporary world, perhaps the only way forward towards that silence is now through - through the noise.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
- This work also contains the following samples from FreeSound.Org
Broadcast 11 - The Economics Of Rest
We come into this world able to sleep. As automatic to us as breathing - we sleep when we need sleep and wake when we need to wake. Yet, somehow, in our modern world we find ourselves in an environment where ‘sleep’ is being sold back to us; luxury mattresses, sleep retreats, corporate nap pods, blackout curtains, magnesium sprays and creams… a growing list of products pushed to ‘help’ us achieve that which we should already know how to do.
Are we eskimo’s being sold snow? Or have our waking lives become so exhausting through technology, that we must fight back with more technology to reclaim our ability to get a good night’s rest?
What was once a biological necessity is now a marketplace. And whilst everything can be sold, perhaps not everything needs to be bought. Sleep is firmly in the crosshairs of the wellness market, and by making sleep a target, by attributing it an objective measure - “a good 8 hours” - we unknowingly also gave birth to conditions for failure. Surely failure to sleep is to not sleep at all? But now, sleeping anything less than 8 can become anxiety inducing.
Eight hours. Promoted as optimal. Repeated by doctors, parents, influencers, personal trainers, friends, family, platforms. A number that circulates so widely it begins to feel moral. To not have it is to be worse than everyone else. The pressure becomes counterproductive - is there nothing worse than worrying about not getting enough sleep, whilst trying to get to sleep? The anxiety compounds itself: worry leads to less sleep, less sleep leads to more worry. A routine we begin building around an ideal starts to bow under its own weight. A vicious cycle that only exhausts and eventually collapses.
But yet, we all somehow know that, intuitively, sleep matters. With only four or five hours, the day feels compromised — focus drifts, decisions suffer, the body slows. With proper rest, things feel easier. We move better, think more clearly, feel more capable. Even without understanding what sleep does, we know when we haven’t had enough of it.
And so the market steps in. Companies and brands promise us improvements: quieter fans, temperature regulating blankets, darker rooms, faster relaxation. And in principle these conditions should benefit us. Anything that genuinely reduces stress, anything that helps us unwind, ought to be useful, and if something works, we should endeavour to keep at it. If it doesn’t, well, we can discard it. But in practice we don’t know the problems - we don't truly understand the why's and why-not's of sleep and so we become vulnerable to the fanciful promises sold by the market, and. if product 'a' didn’t work, well it’s because we had to also needed to get product 'b; to fully experience the benefits. And then product 'b' obviously comes with a membership and some additional products 'c' and 'd', because these products help boost the efficiency and data collection of the other products you've already bought. And if you really, truly, cared about your long-term sleep you should probably invest in product 'e' too...
Problems with sleep have likely existed long before the dawn of technology. It is why sleep rituals and home remedies for sleep-related-issues get passed down generation to generation. Whether placebo or not, these practices often work because they gave us permission to rest. Perhaps modern sleep products are not all that different - by accepting help from technology, we allow ourselves permission to get us to sleep ‘quicker’ and more efficiently. But, if this is so, the question, then, is not so much about whether they function, but about what they replace.
The real edge of the cliff is allowing the help to turn into reliance. The danger isn’t in trying things, but in believing we need them. When rest becomes conditional — dependent on objects, routines, purchases — it becomes fragile.
Ultimately, if we still don’t fully understand why we sleep, how certain can we be about how to perfect it? Maybe the only thing we need to keep in mind isn’t about how to optimise rest, but how much of ourselves we are willing to hand over in the attempt.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 10 - Outsourcing Rest
White-noise machines, smart speakers to wake us up gently, sleep monitors, resting heart-rates, deep sleep apps, pillows with speakers, blackout curtains, deprivation tanks, earplugs... If we think about it, sleep - a necessary and automatic function - has somehow become a something challenging and it's reached the point where we require intervention. But are we challenged because of how we have allowed technology creep into this area? Is there nothing left sacred?
The ideal of having a better sleep appeals to all of us because we are all, in so many different ways, tired and in no way would we turn down the opportunity for better rest. It is precisely ‘because’ it appeals, that it has become a prime space to sell this ideal back to us. What is ironic is that those that study sleep understand that the best way to improve one’s sleep is to develop a regular routine with it. But it’s also like diet and exercise - we know it would be good for us, but are we really going to get up earlier to go into the sun and get in 10,000 steps, and get 15-20 minutes of aerobic exercise and 20 push-ups, squats, sit-ups, pull-ups every day, all while making sure we eat the right balance of fruit and veg and within our recommended calorie intake? Unfortunately not all have the ability to maintain that type of routine.
Now that that pandora’s sleep box has been opened, perhaps it is easier to move forward rather than try to go backwards and so… can we outsource rest? Maybe this is our way forward. Maybe the only way we can combat our over-stimulated technology-filled world is with, ironically, more technology. But, technology that has been designed to target those specific types of over-stimulation. In our progressively noisier world a white-noise machine may be how we can create a predictable ambient audio environment to give us a less disturbed sleep. And blackout curtains may be how we give ourselves respite from an overabundance of digital light.
Yet… these machines that monitor us - record us, watch us, check in on us with digital pulses, listen to our breathing rates, monitor our heart-rates, maybe this is also making us more fragile. We are more aware than ever that we can attach ‘quality’ to our sleep. By measuring that which we did not measure we can become frustrated by it, and we can begin to unravel as we chase numbers that previously held little meaning for us. A sad situation; obsessing over sleep leads to less sleep. Yet, we all already know this - when we toss and turn at night, the worry about getting enough sleep prevents us from sleeping. And with all these digital data points about how many hours sleep we had every night, how deep our sleep was, how many times we woke, our heart rates... we cannot help but obsess from the moment we wake.
In our modern times, there are those that may have a skepticism of technology that monitors us. For those, sleep can become a panic ridden exercise where questions of privacy, trust, and data protection are now bound up in trying to get a good 8 hours.
So forwards into the embrace of technology that targets our issues, or backwards towards a routine that may be at conflict with the world in which we live?
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 09 - Collective Dreams
Where do we go when we dream? And where do our dreams come from? Each generation adds to the ever increasing research on the subject with no one opening a definitive door. Are dreams a collection of synapses randomly firing whilst we process our various thoughts of the day? It would be the equivalent of a hard drive de- and re-fragmenting, and every so often playing clips from random files. Random clips strung together might not make much sense, but we would no doubt endeavour to create order out of the randomness.
The idea of collective unconsciousness is not new. Jung’s idea of collective unconscious was to do with inherited knowledge that transcends cultures and time; things that every individual inherits, responsible for the stark similarities of ideas and ideologies that sprout up again and again over time in different parts of the world. But there is another idea of collective unconsciousness, the idea that perhaps sleep is not as solitary an act as we think, and maybe we are part of a communal network.
What if when we dream we enter a shared space? A space that we don’t yet understand but where all those ideas and thoughts are being transmitted and held. Have you ever had an idea, one that you thought was good, and then it suddenly disappeared? And perhaps down the line you saw a manifestation of that idea coming out of somewhere else?
What if the dream world is a factory? A place where we process ideas that really belong to no-one, and whilst we dream we clock into the dream factory, where an idea is given to us and we’re responsible for moving the idea along a little bit further until we clock out. It might or might not be us that brings the idea into fruition, but either way, through this processing, the idea becomes collective in some ways.
Collective dreams are a studied phenomenon - individuals having, without prior communication, the same dream as others. Is this co-incidence, or is this suggesting a shared space that we tap into when we dream? Different cultures throughout history have talked of dream-walking or waking dreams, and describing the dream-world as an alternate dimension, or a doorway.
If there is a shared space, a dream-field we all drift through, then every night we return to it without memory of the journey to and from it. And maybe the reason we forget our dreams so easily is because remembering too much of that place makes waking life harder to bear? Of course, all of this may be nothing more than the brain telling stories to itself in the dark. But if the stories we dream can be dreamed by others too, then perhaps the boundary between imagination and reality is thinner than we think.
Whether dreams are a private theatre of the mind, or a communal archive we briefly access before waking up to our daily lives, until we find the door that opens in both directions, all we can do is keep dreaming — and keep wondering.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 08 - Circadian Wars
Let there be light. And all species adapted according to the rhythms of the rising and falling of the sun in the sky. In certain regions the days are longer at certain times of year, in others the days stay roughly constant. For the majority of human history we have lived our lives according to day and night. Whilst we found fire to stay up later into the night we still lived and slept in harmony with the rotation of the planet.
Electricity is a recent invention, bringing lights into our homes and places of work. Extending our ‘waking’ hours further. Television if even more recent, entertaining us into the night. As we begin to develop more programming late night television become a reason to stay up late into the early hours.
With neon lights we used in 24 hour cities, cities that never sleep. The thrill and convenience of being able to get whatever we wanted at whatever time, the joy of being awake whilst the rest of the world slept. Night time fun was always around but we had to seek it, now it was on our doorstep.
And now screens. From the minute we wake to the second before our eyes close we are bombarded by lights. Neon. LEDs. 24-hour cycles. Shift work for a night-time life-style. Jet lag from increasingly convenient travel. Adjusting to different time zones from last minute getaways and rushes back to work. Perhaps our evolution is a journey of us pulling ourselves out of sync with the rhythm of nature.
Is it a wonder that we struggle to find rest? Are we designing our environments for commerce or biology? Do we need to design for both? Maybe we're already in a war we're not aware of. An all out assault made of all kinds of lights, bending and twisting our circadian rhythms until we're exhausted and lost.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 07 - Pharmoco-sleep
Bio-hacking. I think on some level we all surely do this - using sugar to give us a boost of energy, caffine to give us a kick, things to keep us alert, happy, CBD gummies to help us rest, supplements help us recover, regulate… This is chemistry meeting culture. Sometimes it’s necessary, often time not.
In modern life, it feels like there is an unspoken, but ever-present, pressure to make the most of our lives, which commonly translates into making the most of our ‘waking time’. We drink coffee to get us kickstarted in the morning, we work through lunches, go out with friends and ingest all sorts; all in the name of hoping to experience as much as possible within the day. And then we crash out and do it all over again. Even if we aren’t going out, the desire to stay awake and continue to absorb more content, more news, more information... is all to common; we’ll be in bed by 11pm but scroll until 3am.
Productivity! Efficiency! These are the rationalisations that help us justify the control we exercise over our daily experiences. In these names we medicate. We medicate against an irrational fear of failure and FOMO. Yet, what this has created is the necessity to then medicate ourselves to rest. Rather than just simply ‘sleep’, we now need to ‘hack’ our sleep. Induce it, create environments and rules, force systems and develop habits, all to do what we naturally should be able to do (but perhaps do not do enough of as we go through our twenties and thirties).
As a gentle reminder, sleep serves as our functional way of regulating our systems. It does this without the need for any intervention, yet by toying with our daily lives, we end up needing to toy with how we sleep.
Perhaps the larger question is why we constantly drive towards more control over our lives. Why optimise? What need is there when the consequence could be a more broken sense of self and a detachment from our natural system of self-regulation?
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 06 - Living With Perpetual Stimulation
Over-stimulation is a big talking point when it comes to rest. Thankfully we can close our eyes to stop taking in information, but the visual media today, and the devices we consume them through, is so very addictive. App developers employ psychological tricks and exploit real patterns of addiction to keep us glued to our phones. The way an app functions has very much been designed to keep you there. The infinite scroll, a.k.a the doom scroll, is an apex feat of addictive design; a never ending carousel of dopamine hits. Another 10 seconds won’t hurt, just one more 20 second video…
Whilst we become mindless, our eyes get fatigued, our neurochemistry saturates, we get entrained into patterns similar to those of addicts. The bright lights and colours suspend us in a continual state of arousal. And we become numb to it. At the worse end, we become desensitised to it. We don’t register the hours lost through bleary eyed late night viewing. We don’t register the impact it has on our well-being. And we certainly don’t register how our attention has forever changed.
How do we recover? Digital detox? Maybe, but that in itself feels more and more like something to say to placate ourselves, to make ourselves feel better, because; to our devices we will return. Maybe we don’t fight it? Maybe we don’t detox? Maybe we can’t compete with perfectly designed addiction devices? So maybe, instead, we try to make real-life more stimulating…? Is that possible?
But perhaps the pursuit of that risks becoming another loop. Life trying to imitate the screen. The question remains not how to escape stimulation, but how to live with it without dissolving into it.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 05 - Sounds To Sleep With
In 2006, Lucy Handscomb, working out of the Audiology department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, published a paper titled ‘Use of bedside sound generators by patients with tinnitus-related sleeping difficulty: which sounds are preferred and why?’. In the paper 39 tinnitus clinic patients, who had made subjective complaints about sleeping difficulty due to their tinnitus were selected to take part in the study where they were given a bedside sound generator that produced 7 digitally recorded sounds; heart beats, sea waves, brook, birds, woods, white noise, and rain. Patients were told to listen to the sounds, select whichever ones they liked and to make sure to listen to them at low volume throughout the night whilst they slept and to turn the machine off in the morning for a period of time between 3 - 14 weeks, with follow up interviews afterwards.
For over a century it has been shown that natural sounds are a good way to alleviate the symptoms, with running water being the most popular amongst patients (as observed in a 2004 study by Pawell Jastreboff and Johnathan Hazell). But Lucy wanted to look into what was actually happening. Was it that exposure to these sounds make the difference between tinnitus-related neuronal activity and background neuronal activity seem smaller, thereby making our auditory systems less sensitive to tinnitus - making this a perceptual difference, or, perhaps the emotional aspects of sounds, the feelings these sounds give us, influence us to simply ‘accept’ the tinnitus - making this an emotional difference.
What happens at night though? When we are not consciously observing and attending to sounds and stimuli? The discussion moves to what kind of sounds are useful in these scenarios - what sounds are ‘neutral’? The sound should be easy to ignore and not be annoying but should also not be pleasant or arousing so that it draws the listeners attention and wakes them - this, according to Jastreboff, who considered nature sounds as examples of meaningless sounds.
But for Lucy, she felt that patients chose these sounds precisely because they have meaning and this was because some of the patients she had encountered grew up around natural environments and these sounds reminded them of home - likely triggering peaceful happy memories which would help anyone fall asleep.
And the reason for her study was to explore if it was the ‘feelings and thoughts’ aroused by the sounds that helped them sleep easier, or the properties within the sounds themselves.
As is often the case with small scale studies, results can’t be generalised so they lay a foundation for further studies to build upon. What Lucy Handscomb did seem to find, or at least suggest within the study was that when given the option of selecting a sound, patients chose sounds based on more emotive reasons rather than selecting a sound because it aided in perceptibly reducing tinnitus. In fact, the sound most disliked was pure white noise which has been used long-term as a day-time therapy to help improve tinnitus coping ability.
So maybe it isn’t the sounds themselves, but rather what we feel about them that makes them good sounds to go to bed with?
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 04 - Being Well
What does it mean to be well and why do we feel unwell?
“Are you tired?”, “Are you getting enough sleep?”, “How are you feeling today?”, “Burned out?”, “Getting enough sunlight?”, “Having enough protein, vitamin B, D, Zinc, folic acid, etc.”
There isn’t a consensus on what we all should do, just a series of concerns and approaches that rise and fall in popularity, ebbing and flowing against each other. Whether we like it or not, the growing conversation make us all focus on our health and well-being more acutely. Is this a good thing? Is it making us examine our health and well-being, or look for all the ways in which it is lacking. And when none of us are perfect examples of health and well-being, does it make us more anxious about it? Because if that is happening, then thinking and talking about our well-being is then also making us less so.
We are responsible for our own health and well-being. We should also remember to be responsible for safe-guarding our sense of it. Sometimes it is a difficult task to not get swallowed by our own sense of failure at looking after ourselves, yet sometimes it’s as simple as recognising when we haven’t had enough sleep and just trying our best to make that one thing happen.
Whatever you think of well-being as, remember to ‘be well’ at the same time. Doing the best you can, can also be good enough, so be gentle to yourself.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 03 - All These Noises
Before we became civilised, before we had control over our environment, our ancestors lived in a state of continued sensory awareness; keeping their senses on high alert in order to understand an unpredictable environment where everything - wildlife, climate, temperature, wrong food - could kill them. Our ancestors relied upon sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, to safely navigate the world. They had to log and store all the information they could in order to understand when things changed and moved out of favour; an unfamiliar sound, a twig snapping in a thicket, a shadow that shouldn’t be there, a new odour on the wind.
Our ancestors did well, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. An in that time between then and now, we have mastered our environment. Our world is much more predictable, more comfortable. We do not live in a state of continual fight-or-flight. Yet… we are over stimulated. We bury our heads into screens that bombard us with all spectrums of light at close range. We put on headphone and try to drown out the world through volume. Somehow, in this more comfortable and safe environment we are fried. And companies take advantage of this by creating apps and systems that take advantage of our biochemical apparatus and reward us with neurological hits of arousal and sedation.
In our most comfortable time of living, we are exhausted. From the comfiest chairs we are incredibly tired. From the softest beds we are restless. How do we find our way back from that?
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 02 - The Little We Know
Why do we sleep? We have yet to find a definitive answer. Something so common, so essential to our lives, and we do not know why we do it. The little we do know is that that we undergo a form of repair and regulation. We need sleep but its biological purpose remains a mystery to us (perhaps as much as our own individual purpose remains as much of a mystery to us). We spend a third of our lives in a state we know very little about. Our brain and internal organs remain active, yet out bodies lie dormant, all the while drifting in and out of various states of sleep.
That 'little' that we do know supports ideas that sleep helps our body do bio-chemical and neurological admin; we process information, consolidate and reorganise neural pathways, repair cells, and release hormones and proteins. For whatever reason, this state of recharge also allows us to rid ourselves of toxic build-ups, both in terms of physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. Our glymphatic system clears out waste by allowing our brains to erase or forget extraneous information that might clog up our central nervous system. Another area of our brain, responsible for responding to fear, the amygdala remains more adaptive if we regulate our sleep. And if we are sleep deprived, our amygdala carries more stress and is prone to overreaction. The amygdala is just one of the areas of the brain where activity increases during sleep. All these parts that show increased activation when we sleep perform deep functions that affect our long-term health and even help us regulate things like hunger by way of suppressing hormones like ghrelin, which increases appetite, and elevating leptin, which increases the feeling of being full after eating. Lack of sleep reverses this... the imbalance making us feel hungrier than we might be.
As research continues, our understanding of sleep and mental-health becomes further inter-twined. And oft times can spiral together; a prolonged period of bad sleep can affect our mental and emotional well-being negatively to the point where our negative emotional state inhibits further sleep... and thus begins a downward spiral. And it is easy to point the finger at the way we live - devices, noises, commerce, FOMO, etc. as reasons for declining mental health when perhaps it is another system that we must adapt to and regulate within?
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
Broadcast 01 - The Art, The Science, The Pseudoscience
Thleep.Earth is an ongoing project that develops light and audio works from the the scientific and pseudo-scientific investigations around sound and light therapy. The works are created by a collective of artists and are an artistic expression first and foremost. Individually, the collective of artists all have different spheres of interest, different experiences of alternative medicine and therapies, and bring their own distinct skepticisms to the project.
The commonality is that ultimately - whether purely placebo or not - sound and light has successfully been used as both intentional and unintentional forms of therapy. When we're sad we might turn to music, but we don't think of this as therapy. When we spend time in the sun we feel energised / recharged, but we don't think of this as therapy. The crash of the ocean waves, listening to cars passing, the gentle mechanical motion of a train - all of it inducing altered state of consciousness.
Today, the global conversation around well-being and physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental health is much more mainstream, so much so that public services now offer alternative therapies alongside pharmaceutical medicine. There are events that claim to deliver healing frequencies, workshops for energy realignment, pills and stickers to reset your bio-rhythms, apps to help you focus... Through all the noise, what is clear is that people are seeking a way to care for their ailments, some desperately so.
We consider the art-space a safe space to test some of these ideas out and design an experience that lets a person explore these scientific and pseudo-scientific claims without any sales-pitch, without needing to sign up for a trial, or without needing to pay for a new technology they're not sure they understand but feel might be 'good' for them.
Tracklist:
- All audio by Thleep.Earth
